Utterly Cool Linux Pictures

Welcome to our collection of cool Linux pics! This is not a comprehensive collection of Linux-related images on the net, but it does cover most of the ones that particularly struck the fancy of Greg Roelofs (who originally created these pages in 1995 and maintained them until 1999)--either because they're ray-traced (a weakness of Greg's) or devastatingly clever or just strikingly lovely.

Meanwhile Greg is happy to report that the Linux folks not only rule in elegance of design but also finally have caught up with (and maybe even surpassed!) the OS/2 folks in the cleverness department. Eugene and Garth's Linux crab is still a favorite, of course; Joe Henderson's Linux elf is even better; and Bill Weinman (or would he be the Anti-Bill?) has finally gotten in a lick at everyone's favorite evil software empire -- at least in the pictures department. That extremely amusing X Windows game for Linux is still available too, you betcha...check out the XBill home page at Micros0ft. Yuk yuk. Oops...it's no longer reachable except by IP number! Egad, the evil empire struck back: "Zero Micro Software (MICROS0FT-DOM) ... **Trademark Dispute** ... Domain Status: On Hold Pending Server Activation" (excerpted from InterNIC's whois server). Sigh. XBill is also available from the XBill home site, just in case.

Is this Web stuff mind-blowing or what? (Mind or chunks, anyway...it's definitely one of the two, to misquote Ash. Groovy.)

Gloom, despair, agony and woe (as some guy on Hee Haw used to say). In a somewhat less-than-amusing April Fool's Day phone call, a certain representative (or so she claimed) of a certain evil hardware empire's legal department told Greg to pack up his lovely Linux Inside logo or die. Well, OK, she didn't actually threaten death, but the implied threat would be considered by most multi-celled organisms to be a fate worse than...

And indeed, the dreaded Letter o' Doom (Greg isn't talking about the fun kind, either) showed up as promised. In a fit of colossal wienerdom, Greg bravely caved in and promised to keep the logo off his web pages, alas. But copies of it are still floating around on the net, and new versions keep getting created (there are now at least five or six, not counting trivial variations of existing ones), so perhaps all is not lost.

In any case, Greg will be back one of these days with something even better (evil cackle...).

Greg had another idea for a true, legally unencumbered Linux logo/trademark; the concept is described on another page (one which Greg has, embarrassingly enough, not updated in a long while). The idea came about when someone asked him whether a logo such as the following one existed anywhere:

Brian Downing used the GIMP (see the PNG-supporting Image Editors page for a pointer) and actually made a decent version of it:

Meanwhile, Craig Bell made a version with a real beer glass; the "virtual" part is missing, but it's still most excellent:

And then Brian added the fading-in wireframe again, with the result that we have a nearly perfect Virtual Beer logo (both generic and ready-for-2.0 flavors):

Greg is most pleased and wishes to thank both Craig and Brian for their fine efforts in bringing an imagined concept to life. Of course, the challenge of making the logo completely ray-traced (with sources) is still open to one and all, and Mike Stute took a mighty swing with this totally ray-traced logo made with his own home-grown ray-tracer:

Although it's hard to see, the lower part of the Pilsner glass does fade to a ray-traced wireframe. Mike's working on making the virtual part a little more obvious. Cool.

Finally, here's another fully rendered virtual brew from Brannon Smith, complete with a funky button bar (so to speak):

Joseph Henderson, an art student at Lamar University, designed this truly excellent "powered by" logo; the amazing thing is that no one else thought of the idea sooner. (Thanks to Jody Cowart for bringing it to Greg's attention.)

Well, OK, maybe just one more "wet" one... This well-done hybrid of Joe's elf and Craig and Brian's virtual beer is by Christian Bianchi:

Rasterman, better known as the author of the Enlightenment window manager, made a drier but still gooey logo:

This extra-cool ray-traced logo will be familiar to anyone who has flipped through one of the older issues of the Linux Journal; it's by Richard Hammond of Pacific HiTech. Sadly, the large version is no longer available from PHT's web server:

Here's another ray-traced logo, this one taking a poke at IBM's famed "Big Blue" logo. Mike Low of Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey (mlow@alpha.fdu.edu) sent it to Greg without a filename; Greg calls it "Bigger Blue" and suggested a ray-traced animation wherein a rotating IBM logo flies apart and reforms like this:

Here's an amusing one by Eugene Piccola (epiccola@clam.rutgers.edu) and Garth Nielsen (garth@say.acnatsci.org):

And another one with a seafood twist, rendered with DESIRe 5.1; Oliver Rode (rode@igd.fhg.de) is the artist:

This very nice ray-traced logo is by Chris Brady (cbrady@ucar.edu):

This simple but elegant design is from David Campbell (davcam@iac.net), maintainer of the Night Vision Linux Links:

This pair of ray-traced beauties is by Marc Christensen (mec4170@u.cc.utah.edu):

And finally, the full (miniature) version of the golden Linux logo that used to reside at the top of Greg's main Linux page. The artist finally revealed himself a while back: he's none other than Stig Olsen of Norway (stigo@ifi.uio.no), self-confessed Linux fanatic. This was modelled in 3D Studio and then rendered with POV-Ray under Linux: